“Asked if Nato was worried that a delay in setting up government risked extremists taking over Mr Rasmussen said: ‘I don’t think it’s a major risk but of course we cannot exclude the possibility that extremists will try to exploit a situation and take advantage of a power vacuum. But based on our talks with the National Transitional Council I do believe they are sincere in their desire for democracy.'”

It seems strange that a longtime neofascist like Griffin would care about what’s going on in predominantly dark-skinned Arabic speaking Muslim Libya, since he built his neofascist organizations – first the National Front, followed by the BNP – on a platform of scapegoating Muslims immigrants and conspiracy theories about Muslims taking over Europe.

This helped the BNP gain electoral success in both the British and EU political scene, so why would NATO “giving” Libya to Islamists be bad news to a far right anti-Muslim extremist like Griffin? Wouldn’t the continued back and forth between dictatorship, civil war and Islamic fundamentalism in Libya be “proof” of these people’s inferiority and as a threat to Western civilization that Griffin and the BNP could exploit for further electoral gain?

A program will only get a political party so far; to get elected requires some cold, hard cash. And that’s what Gaddafi was for Griffin – a potential cash cow. According to the BBC:

“Under Griffin’s control, the National Front supported Libya’s Colonel Gadaffi and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Griffin visited Tripoli in 1988 at Gadaffi’s expense to look for funding from the Libyan regime.”

The leader of a party that seeks to end immigration and claims to be on the frontline in the war against Islamization of Europe supported an Islamist regime and wanted money from another, Islamically-inspired one. Could it be that he’s an opportunist, just like the Islamists he claims to oppose? Or does he see those governments as models for the Britain he wants? Or both?